 Hello everyone and welcome to this session the next generation of main framers and we have two great people here who represent that next generation of main framers. Let's look at the, let's look at them right now here. We have Alex Kim, who is with Viacom Infinity and he's an IBM Z mainframe engineer and architect, and we have Jesse Lane. I'm going to pronounce your name incorrectly Jesse maybe you can help me there. Point of thing, sorry, thank you from Broadcom and she's a product owner of DevOps and she also works very heavily in our Zoey project. And my name is John Murtic I'm the director of program management here at the Linux Foundation and the director of the open mainframe project. Thank you both for joining us today. Thank you for having us. So, no problem, no problem. So, I have some questions for you all, but to help sort of set the context. I want to talk about really what is the open mainframe project really really quickly and this is a project here at the Linux Foundation it's been here for the last six years, and it's real focal point is, you know the understanding of the mainframe, you know it's it's integrated it's part of enterprise IT forward thinking enterprises are looking at their computing infrastructure as a competitive advantage for them. And the tools that they're choosing, it's not from all one vendor anymore it's a multitude of different vendors and it's a multitude of different solutions whether it's mainframe edge computing cloud on a traditional on premise distributed computing. All of it is used by enterprises these days and where the open mainframe really project really comes in is, how can we make that connection between the mainframe and the rest of enterprise and the path to do this is through open source and the projects that we host here at the open mainframe project, all fit within that bar here. So you can see here that vision and vision and mission that we have on the screen really crisply aligns with that. And one of our real key projects here which is a real shining star of how this happens is a project called Zoe, and Zoe is a project that's three years old and it came with that idea of how do we get ZOS connected to enterprise DevOps the rest of the enterprise, you know traditionally mainframes interacting programming with them. There was different mechanisms, you know even going back in time people use green screen terminals and that has moved on we've seen newer technologies being used in that place. So Zoe came in here and said hey let's let's develop tooling that lets you use those technologies that are being used to the rest of the enterprise, and have it so you can interact with ZOS services and it's really been a great success and it's not just from a technological standpoint. We've also seen from a community building standpoint it has come together, and we've seen from a downstream ecosystem standpoint come together so some real fascinating things that we're seeing happening here. I want to kind of dig a little bit into you know both Jesse Lane and Alex's background here. So maybe Jesse will start with you. Tell me, how did you get involved in mainframe. That's a great question, you can call me jelly by the way so it will be much easier. So I started my career in mainframe. Oh, I think 13 years ago. So right out of college, I applied in a local bank in the Philippines. And there, I applied as a programmer training, and I passed and I was assigned to their mainframe department, where I became a cobalt developer so it was really really fascinating and weird for me because we never learned about cobalt and then my first job is a cobalt developer. But it was also a good experience because there I learned how to use the terminal, it's an old school way of coding. And you get to be resourceful, you learn about the system really heavily because you need to know how it works, you need to know where the input file comes from and what the exact output will be designed or written. And so it's good for me because I was able to understand at least how mainframe works in an application developer point of view and how the system works at that time. And then after my first job, I became an expat in Singapore, and there I became a cobalt consultant, you know, more exposure in mainframe tools, I learned about MQs, I learned about kicks more and DB2s. And then after that I transferred to Czech Republic, where I was hired as a system administrator. So I'm an L1 support and there I was able to learn more about the system. I do IPLs, I do starting of DB2s and cakes and so many things. So my knowledge about mainframe really widened a lot, it involves me more. And then I joined Broadcom at around 2017. And this was the time that I started with ZSMF. So I learned about how to provision products in ZSMF, how to use it, how to incorporate, let's say bash codes or bash scripts through provisioning the product. And then I joined Zoey with, first the CLI team. So I created plugins for Zoey CLI and then I joined the Zoexpar Squad to start with the VS Code extension. And I was able to learn how to integrate modern tooling on to mainframe. And it's of course create modern tools for mainframe developers. And that's my career journey. It's interesting, you just kind of how it bounces around, but there's that theme of mainframe throughout it. Alex, I'd love to learn about your journey as well. What got you into mainframe? Sure, sure. Yeah, I have been to many different journeys too, but you know, stayed on the mainframe for 20 years. So I started as a chip designer. I was a hardware developer at IBM Procipcie doing chip design for a critical processor that goes into the mainframe actually. Until then, I didn't have any clue what mainframe was. So I was doing chip development and the IO development and the mainframe for seven years in Procipcie. And then I switched my job to sales side, technical sales, helping clients in Wall Street and the mainframe deployment. And they use the mainframe for their business applications. So I was helping a lot of, you know, clients in Wall Street that understand the importance of the mainframe for their business. So after serving the clients, you know, about seven years, I joined Vikom Infinity. We are platinum IBM business partner for mainframe. And working with, you know, someone like Lanzan Central Chia that get involved a lot of, you know, ecosystem on the mainframe, we were able to join open mainframe project. And I was lucky to, you know, learn about Zoey project, and we participated some mentors program by open mainframe project and we started, you know, creating some new open source project such as Zebra so that we can help mainframe users and find a way to create a new opportunities and also recruit the new mainframeers such as, you know, our interns at the OMP Mentors Program. So it's been great journey, learning from hardware side, moving to the software side and also contributing back to the mainframe project with the open source. It's been great experience. That's awesome to hear and I want to dig into both of you from an open source contribution perspective here in a moment. Before I do that, I want to sort of ask you told us the how like where did you how did you get here from, you know, how did you get there from here from there. What's the why like what was what's been the motivating factor to keep you in this ecosystem and staying as they call it the mainframeer. And maybe Alex why don't you answer this one first we'll kind of move things around a little bit. Sure. To me mainframe is big big jungle and and for someone coming to the mainframe space as new newbie it could be very, you know, confusing or hard because a lot of acronyms and terms are totally different from what you're familiar with. You know, coming from the x86 side or workstation side, but knowing, you know, the basis of how and why the architecture mainframe is designed that really helped me and also what drives me to stay on mainframe as well as the open source for the mainframe is that you can actually see the needs from the clients and users of the mainframe, and then there are so many things you can do and help and contribute being part of this open source community for mainframes. That's awesome. That's awesome. Jelly, tell me the same story like why, why mainframe because you've done a lot of different things in mainframe. So tell me why. That's true. Originally, I can tell you it's about job stability, you know, I do know that mainframe jobs is very stable but through the years it's like, similar to what I say about Kabul mainframe has become a big part of my life and I truly truly love it. The more that I learn about it, the more that I say I'm going to use fell in love with it because it's very big, like what Alex said, the architecture of mainframe is very big and complex and you know more as you go through your career journey, like the more experience that you have, the more things that you learn about mainframe and it's not just like a very simple learning, it's a very interesting learning, you know, especially with my career that I started with a 3270 terminal, that I learned how technically how computer works in an old fashioned way that it fascinated me because coming from let's say with a UI that the modern UI, I don't really know what's happening on the background of it. Say for example, if I do TypeScript programming, there are modules that I import that I'm not really sure how it works, but if I work with Kabul, I should know and I will know what will happen. So that part there is what I really like about it. And then when I went to system administration, I liked that I was able to understand how the system works, how, when you do an IPL, what will be the products that are involved in it, what will be the started tasks or what is the importance of this timeline, why do you do the IPL every weekend, you know, things like that that affects the banking system itself and for me that kinds of learning, I treasure those things and then now that I'm part of the modern mainframe experience, I am happy that I am able to integrate more modern new links to mainframe and I can call myself let's say an inventor because I do try to research and invent new ways to communicate to mainframe and as a developer, that's very challenging for me and I stay with mainframe because of those things, because of these innovations. That's awesome. That's really interesting. So, both of you I would dare to say are top contributors to open source on the mainframe. I mean I think that's that's goes without saying, you know Alex you have done a ton of work in the zebra project, and you know other areas of upstream Zoe including, you know some of your own work there as well. I mean really you've done a ton on the CLI and other contributions. Tell me, and I don't know how much outside of that you have done with open source but I guess, you know for somebody here who might be in the audience is like oh I'm an open source developer contributor. Is it different on mainframe what is it like on mainframe. What, what is that experience like like I mean how, and especially in such an industry that is very much perceived as close source. You know the concept of being an open source developer here probably feels foreign to a lot but it feels natural to you both. Tell me about what that experience has been like. And whoever wants to jump on this one I won't kind of do assign names. Maybe I can start. The one thing well the first thing that I notice about contributing to open source, or maybe a comparison between a mainframer and somebody who's a contributor to open source is the mindset that they have in terms of programming. Because as a mainframer the one, or at least when you code in COBOL the first thing that you think of is that it should be easy to debug, or as much as possible the modularized is the better, and don't use negative conditions so things like that. And when you contribute to open source, sometimes for me, when I do my coding in open source especially in TypeScript, they have a different mindset on how to handle things. It's still modularized, but I cannot really explain it, but it's somehow for me the way that people think in mainframe are very different on how the open source run thus in terms of contributing code. Do you see that mindset changing? Have you seen that change? I mean you've been in this for 13 years. Have you seen that change a little bit? I think so. In terms of being part of SOE, when we are let's say advocating for this PS code part and how to contribute, I do see changes in terms of the students of COBOL and as well as the open source contributors. I like that they have this combined mindset. They think about how the mainframe will perceive this or how the mainframe will accept this and then they will innovate on how the distributed world are doing this. So it's like a combination on how you code in mainframe and how you code in the distributed world. So I do see those changes right now with the students that I communicate with in the COBOL course. That's awesome. Alex, tell me your experience and again you've been doing, it sounds like from a lot of your background coming from ship design and then really working with Wall Street clients there. Certainly not an area that it's natural open source, although we are seeing that change here as we've seen in other parts of this conference here, but certainly as Jellie indicated that's a slow transition that's happening. What has been your experience being one of the leading open source contributors in mainframe? Thank you, John. And first of all, I'm just one of the people who are in this project and I think that there are many other contributors doing a lot of commits to the GitHub than me, so I'm not really a main contributor. You're too kind about yourself. I mean, both of you are very too kind about yourselves. You're doing amazing work. Thank you. We have a team of people. Actually, the fascinating part of this open source on the mainframe is that you made Old and New. I read a blog last night about the old Roman architects and they have a still like a Colosseum architecture is out in the room, right? And then they build something new around it for the Pope's house and you combine these two together, the old architecture and the new architecture, and you have this beautiful piece of the architecture you can experience yourself. I think the mainframe and the open source can represent that. You have this very historical and proven technology that lasted over 40 years, almost 50 years. You still have a code that from that time that runs okay with no problems, but you still, you have this new way of coding and new languages that can adapt and run a lot better than the other architectures out there and with a better security. I think combining these two together with open source is very, you know, create a good synergy and it's very explosive and having working with this new mainframeers, like out of college, and they have no clue what the mainframe is. But talking about the mainframe architecture and how the individual instructions may interact in the CPU versus IO versus other protocols, they get fascinated and then, and they have no, you know, objection about learning about the mainframe, and they actually get fascinated about the technology and they couldn't hear about it before. And the contributions they made, and as a team is great experience and that I think is driving, you know, you know, the energy of this contributing to the open source on a mainframe. That is awesome. So I want to do three rapid fire questions and then a closing one real quick, just to kind of keep things going. And for the technical people in the audience you'll probably love this and I borrowed this from someone I've heard used before. Both of you quick, what's your favorite text editor your editor for doing code development. This guy. The I. Oh, you're a man after my own heart. What is your favorite programming language. JavaScript. I, you know, I would JavaScript, but I have to say, recently, as we've started to dig more into cobalt I've drawn a huge, you know, affinity for that. You know that's definitely for sure. And I guess I said I was going to have three but I had two really good ones so maybe maybe let's close to get to the, the back end here. You both have been in this industry a long time. You have certainly established yourselves as as leaders within, you know, this group here and especially leaders within open source and mainframe which is fantastic. You both see as I guess or maybe a better way to look at this is, what's one thing that you're looking forward to in the future with mainframe. And maybe Alex will let you answer first. I think that the mainframe shapes the future. Recently, you know, of course, the hardware itself is mostly driven by IBM. And there are, you know, some other similar technologies out there but a lot of concerns in the IT industry, especially for security side. The mainframe architecture has a way to solve the problems and using, you know, open source technologies coming from other architecture into mainframe is actually a very bright and exploit the, you know, the other capabilities. That's awesome. Jelly. So for me, I actually believe that today is a great time to innovate for mainframe, especially with Zoli around. There are a lot of things that, like what Alex said before, there are knowledge from the modern today's right now that the modern development that we have and as well as the mainframe development. And so what I see in the future for mainframe is this two worlds will combine together and the people who knows about this two worlds will innovate more and more for mainframe. So I do hope that, you know, there would be a lot of new generation of mainframeers will join the mainframe community, and they will contribute their knowledge on how to let's say, improve mainframe more and more throughout the years. That's that's awesome. That's awesome. Now I think I think we're seeing a certain resurgence in mainframe not that it was ever gone, but it is so much more coming to the forefront right now. I have some links up here in the screen here I want everyone you know everyone can sort of take a look at it while we have these up on here. I'm sure there's things that I didn't ask you that you would both maybe like to talk about here and we have a couple, we have a couple minutes left here. What did I miss like what what else would you want to share with this audience around being that new generation of mainframe. I would like to invite them to join our Slack channel and and the GitHub and just take a look at and if you're from the financial sector. And if you're interested, you know, making sure your transactions is secure mainframe is the place. Just try it out for me. I invite you to try it out. There are the open mainframe couple course. Let's give you a let's say a public access to mainframe where you could try out all of these tools that we have in Zoli so for me. Just check it out. That's that's that's half of the battle jump in there and try it out learn I mean I will say this is an extremely inviting community you jump in there and you say hi. People are going to go jump and talk to you. There are people really welcoming and exciting just to see new people get involved. So here on the screen ways to get involved in the open mainframe project I mean obviously our newsletter we have our projects. You know for those of you in the audience that are with vendors or users of mainframe there's opportunities for you to join as a member of the open mainframe project just as many of our other Linux foundation projects and you can learn more about that as well. And certainly our communication channels we have a great slack channel we have a community forums. We have a number of mailing lists as well. YouTube social the whole nine yards there's a lot of great ways to see what's going on. I want to learn about you know more than just jelly and Alex but you know a broad range of mainframe main framers young old and from globally that are making amazing impacts and are really leading forward. Open source on the mainframe so definitely spend some time and check all of that out. So I want to thank jelly Alex thank you so much for joining us and participating in this event. We look forward to the day where we get to be back together again. It's been a long time since we've all been in the same room but I think that day is coming soon so I hope you all stay safe and well, and I want to thank you. Thank you. Hey well. Bye bye. Thank you and thank you all for attending this session, and we look forward to also seeing you again in the future and hope you all stay safe and well as well. Bye everyone.